OSNews: http://www.osnews.com/story/24125/Introduction_to_OpenCL Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2013, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 22 May 2013 01:52:58 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif OSNews.com http://www.osnews.com not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453263 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453263 I'm pleasantly surprised to read the part stating that multi-core cpu's are also targeted by OpenCL.
Sweet! Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rebel787) Comments RE: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453266 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453266 Yes, OpenCL is really nice. It's really a front-end to many different architectures. You program in OpenCL and it can run on GPU (nvidia and ati), CPU (amdstream), or other kind of processors. No need for porting.
The resulting programs might not be as fast as Nvidia's CUDA (I haven't seen anything proving that though) but at least it can run _everywhere_ Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (big_gie) Comments RE[2]: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453268 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453268 Except on OS's that don't have OpenCL available, which is everything other than the Big 3. Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jondice) Comments CUDA platform support on x86 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453270 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453270 Interesting. Alot of developments in this area.

Few months ago nvidia also announced its porting of the CUDA platform to x86
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/nvidia-ports-its-cuda-...

I wonder how the integrated GPU/CPU chips coming out next year (Intel'sandy Bridge and AMD Fusion) is going to affect these developments. Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (fran) Comments RE[3]: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453271 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453271 Yes, it's still a new technology. The 1.1 specification is just 5 months old, and the 1.0 is a year old. It's not mature like MPI, but then MPI has been there for something like 2 decades... Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (big_gie) Comments RE: CUDA platform support on x86 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453272 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453272 Hum interesting. That's why Nvidia's drivers do not support OpenCL on the CPU. They still want to lock people in with CUDA. Sun, 12 Dec 2010 19:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (big_gie) Comments RE[2]: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453277 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453277 Yeah.
Though that does not mean that you should not create different versions for each device(-type), be it by auto-generating code or by hand-crafting it.

E.g. each device has a prefered vector size, using that will make things faster. Further each system has a different amount of local memory etc.

What I find great is that it is relatively easy to write a kernel and with a little amount of time it is quite fast. Only writing the boiler plate code sucks, though the bindings can help there. ;) Edited 2010-12-12 21:20 UTC Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (mat69) Comments RE: CUDA platform support on x86 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453278 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453278
Interesting. Alot of developments in this area.

Few months ago nvidia also announced its porting of the CUDA platform to x86
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/09/nvidia-ports-its-cuda-...

I wonder how the integrated GPU/CPU chips coming out next year (Intel'sandy Bridge and AMD Fusion) is going to affect these developments.


From what I understand when it comes to sandy bridge from Intel OpenCL will be based on AVX extensions that should provide the sorts of performance one would normally get from a dedicated GPU. There are rumours that maybe Apple will consider AMD but I think those are premature and misplaced rumours because even though AMD has made great strides when it comes to battery life Intel still has the crown in that area. Sun, 12 Dec 2010 21:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kaiwai) Comments RE[3]: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453293 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453293 Exactly, OpenCL is really not that portable when it comes to optimized kernels. A lot of templating is necessary.

I.e. good performing code in ATI GPUs will not necessarily perform efficiently on NVIDIA parts, and viceversa.

The most "portable" of these technologies, ironically, is CUDA. Granted it is only portable across NVIDIA architectures, and now x86 CPUs.

The biggest issue with these sort of tools is that as long as the GPUs etc are on different address spaces, the programming models will continue to be hindered significantly. Mon, 13 Dec 2010 02:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tylerdurden) Comments RE[2]: CUDA platform support on x86 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453333 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453333
Hum interesting. That's why Nvidia's drivers do not support OpenCL on the CPU. They still want to lock people in with CUDA.


What is worse in my opinion is that OpenGL and OpenCL describe the drivers and not the hardware. If they could become real HW standards or provide standard graphics / acceleration hardware interfaces that are vendor /os -independent (it means no vendor and os specific drivers) then we could see a real revolution. You could have acceleration out of the box without driver installation. OS could provide everything irregardless of the chipset. At least for me OpenCL is a tremendous opportunity to utilize a 6-core phenom that is fully documented. Hardware must be designed according to standards and not standards according to drivers. Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (fithisux) Comments RE: CUDA platform support on x86 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453334 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453334
I wonder how the integrated GPU/CPU chips coming out next year (Intel'sandy Bridge and AMD Fusion) is going to affect these developments.


While these integrated chips are on a single package, theyr'e still two discrete components being placed inside a single box. From the OpenCL perspective, whether the devices are integrated or on discretely seperate PCIe bus lanes, the programming API is unchanged. The OS and the framework still see them as two logically seperate devices. When retrieving the list of available OpenCL devices, you'd get get a CPU device and a GPU device. The physical integration into a single package is invisible to the API. Mon, 13 Dec 2010 16:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (CodeMonkey) Comments RE[3]: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453339 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453339
Except on OS's that don't have OpenCL available, which is everything other than the Big 3.


I've got OpenCL from Nvidia running on Debian as they packaged in Experimental. Mon, 13 Dec 2010 17:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (tyrione) Comments RE[3]: CUDA platform support on x86 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453340 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453340 Couldn't agree more... Though being a hobby OS developer might result in some bias in that area ;)

Seriously, why should HW vendors be trusted to provide entire parts of the operating system in the form of (bloated) drivers, when they could just follow a standard spec in terms of hardware/software interface, and (re)write the spec when it's not good enough for them ?Edited 2010-12-13 18:40 UTC Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Neolander) Comments RE[4]: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453341 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453341 Doesn't Debian belong to "Big 3" as a linux distro ? I thought it was a shortcut for Windows/OSX/Linux... Mon, 13 Dec 2010 18:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Neolander) Comments Apple And Open Standards http://www.osnews.com/thread?453345 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453345 For all the boo ha about Apple's closed system and standards, they do a lot of good work in open source and open standards. OpenCL is great. I really hope it takes flight. Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (purplemecha) Comments RE[5]: not just for gpu's http://www.osnews.com/thread?453377 http://www.osnews.com/thread?453377 Yeah, that's what I meant. Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jondice) Comments